Conference Agenda

The paper asks three research questions regarding the ongoing cost savings program undertaken by the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the American government under President Donald J. Trump.

1. Does this program qualify as a case of an emerging model of public management reforms? With the other cases from Bukele's El Salvador, Milei's Argentina, Bolsonaro's Brazil, Meloni's Italy, (K)ishiba's Japan and Orban's Hungary, the proposition is made that DOGE is an instance of an emerging neo-NPM model of public administration reforms.

2. What are the defining attributes of such a model? It is proposed to define neo-NPM through the following attributes: (1) anti-bureaucratic stance, (2) radical downsizing goals, (3) reliance on digitization to achieve efficiency gains and transformation, (4)

direct interaction with the public through social media to support ongoing reforms, (5) reliance on outsiders and overall anti-institutional attitude. As with every model, the cases listed above only comply with some of these definitional attributes.

3. Is neo-NPM different from NPM? It is argued that the main differences between both are (1) neo-NPM's reliance on technology as opposed to markets, (2) neo-NPM's intentionally chaotic and fast approach to reform as opposed to NPM's slow systematism, (3) neo-NPM's reliance on outsiders as opposed to business professionals, and(4) its populist, as opposed to technocratic approach.

Methodologically, the paper relies on a comparative analysis of cases for purposes of building the concept of neo-NPM, and on analysis of social media data and documents, and on a literature review to score the cases on the attributes and define the different attributes, and perform the comparison with the NPM concept.

The main implication of the paper is the need to approach DOGE as an instance of a wider wave of public management reforms, and to submit it to the same academic treatment of the previous ones, including, i.e.: continuous evaluation, development, and elaboration of critical alternatives

The paper draws on surveys of citizens in the five Nordic countries in the aftermath of the covid pandemic. The Nordic countries pursued quite different policies regarding the role of local government in terms of crisis management. In some countries, local authorities were largely left to their own devices, in other countries their tasks were closely scripted by national government.

The citizens were invited to rate the performance of their municipalities as crisis managers in times of unprecedented disruptions to normal service provisions. The data detail citizens’ experiences with specific services such as schools, kindergartens, public transport, etc. The analysis contextualises citizens’ experiences across the five national policy settings and 1100 plus local authorities of the Nordic countries.

The analysis demonstrates, furthermore, how these experiences impacted on trust in government. The overall findings suggest that local government crisis performance is an important long-term determinant of trust in government.

The paper reports from a four-year project on pandemic management in the Nordic countries financed by the Norwegian Research Council (the POLYGOV project).

Public sector reforms have seen numerous transformations over the years due to different models of governance inspired by to changing political and economic variables, at a global level. These paradigms of governance, from the traditional hierarchical administration to the market oriented New Public Management and collaboration oriented New Public Governance; helped the public sector structure its priorities and strategies, both internally and externally/globally (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2017; Christensen & Lægreid, 2011). But in practice, these shifts are rarely linear or acting in isolation. Reform elements from earlier models have the tendency to merge with the current ones and to preserve those fragments by recombing and, later, reemerging with new terminology (Christensen et al., 2007; Hood & Peters, 2004). In this case, even if newer reforms digital-era governance (NPG) are now dominant in public administration, NPM reform characteristics persist in the practice of institutions and discourse of public servants and leaders. These NPM fragments, while modified, and in a few instances rebranded; still influence administrative reform agendas, particularly in digitalization processes and performance-based accountability (Lapsley & Miller, 2024; Dan, Lægreid & Špaček, 2024).

While justifications such as institutional legacies and administrative culture have dominated explanations of reform continuity (Peters, 2019; Painter & Pierre, 2005), the role of agency, particularly of political and administrative leadership, is comparatively under researched in systematic reviews. Extending the problematization approach established by Alvesson and Sandberg (2011), this study reopens existing assumptions about reform persistence by focusing on the explanatory value of leadership in resuscitating elements of New Public Management (NPM). Leadership is understood here as the actions and strategies of political leaders and high-ranking public administrators that shape, modify, or anchor reform trajectories (Dan & Pollitt, 2014). Through a PRISMA-guided systematic literature review, the study investigates how leadership is conceptualized in scholarly literature focused on public administration reforms, and how it is linked to the survival and adaptation of NPM reform elements in governance contexts. The main objective of this study is to analyse how the academic literature presents the work of reform leaders (high-ranking administrative officials and political actors) in perpetuating, reusing or rebranding the New Public Management characteristics (NPM fragments) over time. More specifically, the study questions whether these actors are portrayed as active innovators, implementing NPM elements in new governance frameworks, or as passive perpetuators of established administrative NPM practices. Those being often in relationship with external political networks such as the EU, NATO, or partner states (Dimitrova & Toshkov, 2009).

This research will add to the ongoing debate about NPM resilience (Lapsley & Miller, 2024; Oehler-Sincai, 2008) in public administration literature by analysing how the actions and narratives of reform leaders are theorized in academic research. This can help to account for the endurance of certain models of governance despite major changes in administrative theory. In doing so, it strives to bridge the gap between policy reform theoretical debate and administrative practical continuity.

How citizens react to performance information on public services has received a great deal of attention in public administration. This paper looks to add to the understanding of performance information use through examining the gameplay behaviour and decisions of citizens in a gamified budget simulation.

Participants were given performance information on two fictional schools and played a game in which they managed the budgets of the same two schools. After the game, participants responded to a survey measuring their subjective and observed voice behaviour regarding and trust in the schools.

Regression analysis results indicate that participants adjusted their trust evaluations based on the in-game performance and in-game feedback and exhibited lower trust when more engaged with the game. However, providing participants with performance information prior to playing the game did not impact the participants’ gameplay behaviour. The results suggest that citizens place primacy on their own experiences when evaluating trust.